The Room That Hummed at Nine

Four winters at Ashfield, and I walk the rounds in one fixed order, so that anything which has moved since last night is obliged to declare itself. "Boiler room, kitchens, the long west hall, wards last," I tell the stairs. I say it aloud because a building with nobody in it will take any voice it is offered, and because a woman who stops speaking in here begins to listen instead.

Room 214, east wing, second floor, hums for nine minutes at nine o'clock and stops, and three months of it stand in the notebook in the same six words. Nine oh one, 214, stops nine ten.

The hum is a fixture. The tap is new.

It originates on the top floor, in the end ward, which has no radiator and no window that opens, and it runs at one beat a second, holding that rate whether I stand on that floor or three below it.

Twice this winter I have climbed with the notebook and come down with nothing entered, because the sound is written before it is named; that is the rule, and there is no honest word for a knock that follows a woman down two flights of stairs.

"All right," I said. "Nine oh one, and the hum still going under my feet. Top floor." I entered the time and went up.

"Just me," I told the first landing, as I tell every empty floor. My voice went out flat and came back with something under it, and the tap arrived beside my boots and kept to them, one step to one knock. On the fourth stair I stopped, and it stopped, and when I put the foot down again the knock came down with it, and I was three steps lower before I worked out that my legs had turned me round without consulting me.

"That is my step you are taking," I said. "You can have your own." I made myself climb, and talked the whole way up, so it would have my voice to follow instead of my silence.

The ward door at the end of the top floor was standing open.

"No," I said. "No. I lock that."

That door is locked at the end of every round, and the key is on the ring in my pocket. Warm air was travelling out of the doorway into the cold of the hall, as if a stove were going in a wing whose pipes were capped the year before I was hired.

There is no live water in that wall.

So I went in, because the job is to check the dark room yourself instead of blaming the plumbing, and the door swung shut behind me while I reached for the light. The latch took.

My keys were out in the corridor lock, where I had left them hanging.

The tap and I, in the dark, on the same side of the door.

It had come away from the wall and stood out near the middle of the floor at about the height of my knee, and it did not hurry, and it did not stop.

"Right," I said. "I am shut in with you, so we may as well be civil. I am going to keep talking, and you are going to keep on at that, and at some point one of us runs out." Each time I spoke it held off, and each time I ran dry it started again, as if it had the whole winter to spend on me. "Nine knocks. Ten. Eleven. I am counting you, whatever you are."

"Say something, then," I said. "Anything you like. I have been coming up these stairs since November."

Out of the dark, in a voice like a coat coming off a hook, something said: "Goodnight."

I put my back against the door and did the one thing I am good at.

Notebook out. Nine oh nine, top ward, one word, spoken. Then the tap stopped, and I turned the light onto my wrist, and the watch read nine ten.

"Nine ten," I said. "Nine oh one to nine ten, which is 214's hour, and the hour on every page I have."

I put the light into the corner, where an iron line ran down through the floorboards, four inches of it clear of the plaster, the one warm object in a room with nothing to make heat.

"You run down the east side," I said. "You run down to 214, and 214 was the children's ward. Somebody sat up here at the end of the day and knocked on you, so the ones two floors under her would know a person was awake."

I entered the guess under the sound, which in four winters I have never done.

Getting out cost the door.

I put the leg of a ward chair through the wired glass at shoulder height and reached round to my own keys, and there is no lock left up there worth the name, and I could not shut that ward now if the trust instructed me to.

"Goodnight," I said to the room, because it had said it first.

Then I went down and began the rounds again. Boiler room, kitchens, the long west hall. At nine the following night I stopped outside 214, put my knuckle to the pipe, and gave it two.